Update: Tom Cruise was being courted for at least six different big Hollywood projects. Out of all the possible projects, the star has chosen the least interesting one. Cruise is in talks to join Cameron Diaz in the 20th Century Fox action-comedy Wichita. Cruise will play an undercover agent who pops in and out of the life of a woman (Diaz) who has man trouble. Cruise and Diaz have approved the script, which most recently was worked on by Scott Frank (The Lookout) and Laeta Kalogridis (Shutter Island). Directed by Walk the Line/3:10 to Yuma helmer James Mangold, Fox hopes to have the film in theaters for a Summer 2010 release.Read More »

Can someone perform a drive-by on this project while blasting Harold Faltermeyer instrumentals? We’ve already seen a 180-spin with Beverly Hills Cop IV, with poolguy Brett Ratner originally playing to the kiddies, then predictably back-pedaling and labeling the film “hard R, brah” followed by a tepid review of the script and its more serious “standard cop movie” tone (Judge Reinhold gets murdered etc).

Apparently screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, who remain hot from adapting Wanted and 3:10 to Yuma, have been tinkering with their original draft. CineFools just interviewed Brandt, who clarifies that the BHC4 script is a reworking of their older, unrelated script entitled Dying Day. This reminds me of how a script entitled “Simon Says” was used, adequately if not definitively so, for Die Hard 3. Brandt had this to say about the project’s progress…

LatinoReview has gotten a look at Michael Brandt and Derek Haas‘ screenplay for Brett Ratner‘s “Beverly Hills Cop 2009“. Yes, even the title has a Ratner-level of annoyance. So what’s it about?

Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) is killed from a fall out of the 20th story of the Los Angeles Police Headquarters, but Axel (Eddie Murphy) refuses to believe it was a suicide. He is teamed up with a fat rookie cop with low self-esteem named Goodwin to solve the “murder”. And when he’s not on the case, Axel is trying to hook Goodwin up with a lady cop in the facial recognition department whom he has a crush on, and teach him the ropes. And the whole thing degenerates into a “pretty standard police corruption story”. How bad does this sound already? Well here are the top four reasons (quoted directly from Latino Review) on why this will probably suck:

“A lot of the shit in the middle is way boring.”

“Axel Foley has no funny lines”

“It’s like Brandt and Haas saw the first BHC and just didn’t have the energy to write anything that matched up to it.”

“It’s almost like the writers took an Arnold Schwarzenneger script they had lying around and changed the details to make it a Beverly Hills Cop movie. There’s no fun in it.”

/Film reader Editor E has passed along word that screenwriters Derek Haas and Michael Brandt have already been hired by Universal to pen a sequel to Wanted. Derek Haas revealedÂ that

“We’re just finishing up a book adaptation for Universal of the James Siegel novel Deceit. We’ve been hired to write the sequel to Wanted by the same studio,” Derek Haas revealed to Pajiba. “And we’ve got a few more things in the hopper that it’s a little premature to talk about.”

I always assumed that Wanted was going to be in and out of movie theaters when it is released in June. The online response to the project has been minimal. But it seems like Universal believes they might have a franchise on their hands. Brandt and Haas, who also worked on the screenplay for the original film, are also credited with 3:10 to Yuma, Catch that Kid, and the upcoming big screen adaptations of Spy Hunter and The A-Team.